Application bundles? Puhlease. [LWN.net]

Application bundles? Puhlease.

Posted Aug 2, 2008 20:18 UTC (Sat) by salimma (subscriber, #34460)
In reply to: Application bundles? Puhlease. by khim
Parent article: Will LSB 4 Standardize Linux? (InternetNews)

The advantage of bundles is that it contains more metadata than a simple tarball.
Compatibility problems might arise, but at least the application launcher could provide more
meaningful feedback to the user.

Or even integrate with the OS' version control system, especially now that Linux has
PackageKit, to say "hey, the user wants to run this new bundle that needs libfoo-x.y, install
whatever package is necessary to provide that".

You'd need a package management system that automatically scans built packages for what
libraries they provide; RPM does that, not sure whether DPKG does.

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Application bundles? Puhlease.

Posted Aug 2, 2008 20:51 UTC (Sat) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

I elaborated the point on my blog. To summarize, a bundle allows for better integration with the native package management system. It provides a more user-friendly experience too -- drag and drop your applications and libraries. I forgot to argue that in the blog entry.

And who can use this metadata?

Posted Aug 3, 2008 13:20 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

The advantage of bundles is that it contains more metadata than a simple tarball.

So what? README.txt/INSTALL.txt written in English is quite good for human and it's impossible to use metadata till there are no organization which resolves conflicts, give canonical names for libraries, etc. It's easy to request "convert" binary - but then your application will fail due to difference between ImageMagick and GraphicMagick flags. It's easy to request QT 3.3.x but then your application can not start since ABI was changed when immodule-qt was used. And if you need to just start your own background service - you still need to supply bunch of scripts for different distributions. Libraries and binaries (which is currect focus of all these systems) are easy, almost trivial: HDD space is cheap so just bundle all libraries with your package. Easily doable with tarball. And the hard stuff (do you need to talk with esd? with arts? or use PulseAudio daemon?) is not solved by current generation of bundle systems.

Note: I've not said that bundles can never ever work. Who knows? Perhaps sometime in the future... when all will ditch this obsolete Linux and switch to great new HURD... but not today. So far all tries failed miserably. They are either work for limited usecases (0install is example here) or threaten to kill the host system altogether (autopackage and friends).